In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell, the character of James Tayper Pace serves, at one point, as mouthpiece for Murdoch’s ideas about fantasy versus reality, and the need to lose our egos via what she calls unselfing, a term she used in her 1970 work on moral philosophy The Sovereignty of the Good.

James is introduced in a way that makes us like him immediately:

The man was large and broad-shouldered, but a little gaunt and drawn in the face underneath his sunburn. He had an open friendly expression and a wide forehead crossed by rows of regular lines. He had plenty of curly dark brown hair, going grey in places. His heavily veined hands were lightly clasped on his knee, and his gaze shifted easily along the row of passengers opposite, appraising each without embarrassment. he had the sort of face which can look full of amiability without smiling, and the sort of eyes which can meet the eyes of a stranger and even linger, without seeming aggressive, or seductive, or even curious.

The Bell is the story of a newly-formed lay community associated with Imber Abbey, an Anglican convent in Gloucestershire. The laypeople live at Imber Court, a family house owned by the head of the lay community, Michael.

James has been invited by the Abbess of the convent to join the small community at Imber Court, and Michael welcomes him, taking an immediate strong liking to him. “Indeed some ingeniuty would have been required to dislike him, he was a character of such transparent gentleness,” writes Murdoch, from Michael’s perspective. While Michael recognizes that James may make a better leader for the community than himself, James refuses, citing ill health from previous overwork.

Nevertheless, James plays an important role in the community. One Sunday, he gives the sermon at the weekly gathering:

‘The chief requirement of the good life’, said James Tayper Pace, ‘is to live without any image of oneself. I speak, dear brothers and sisters, as one who is most conscious of being remote from this condition.’ It was the next day, Sunday, and James was standing on the dais in the Long Room, one arm resting lightly on the music stand, delivering the weekly talk. He frowned nervously and swayed to and fro as he spoke, tilting the stand with him.

He went on. ‘The study of personality, indeed the whole conception of personality, is, as I see it, dangerous to goodness. We were told at school, at least I was told at school, to have ideals. This, it seems to me, is rot. Ideals are dreams. They come between us and reality – when what we need most is just precisely to see reality. And that is something outside us. Where perfection is, reality is. And where do we look for perfection? Not in some imaginary concoction out of our idea of our own character – but in something so external and so remote that we can get only now and then a distant hint of it.[‘]

This is presenting Murdoch’s distinction between fantasy and imagination, though she uses “ideals” and “dreams” here in place of the term she uses elsewhere to represent the ego turned inward: “fantasy.”

I wrote previously of this idea of Murdoch’s:

For Murdoch, fantasy and imagination are distinct activities. Fantasy is self-enclosed; it is imagination turned inward, serving the ego’s needs and stories. It projects your desires, fears, and ideals onto the world. It makes other people into characters in your drama, dream figures. It prevents genuine perception or moral growth.

Imagination, in Murdoch’s sense, is outward-facing and disciplined. It’s a moral faculty that allows you to see beyond yourself. In relationship, it asks what is this person really like, apart from my desires and fears? It’s a creative effort to apprehend reality truthfully. It’s what she sometimes calls attention or unselfing, the deliberate sometimes painful act of clearing away illusion so another being can appear in their full particularity.

While I am only partway through the book – about 43% according to my Kindle reader – I am eager to see how she uses her development of character and plot to further this philosophical idea.

As James continues his sermon, he presents a view of how to be good that seems simplistic:

We should think of our actions and look to God and to His Law. We should consider not what delights us or what disgusts us, morally speaking, but what is enjoined and what is forbidden. And this we know, more than we are often ready to admit. We know it from God’s Word and from his Church with a certainty as great as our belief. Truthfulness is enjoined, the relief of suffering is enjoined; adultery is forbidden, sodomy is forbidden.

Here, this seems a challenge though unknowing to Michael, who has suppressed his homosexuality based on his religious faith. His sexual orientation, as well as his interest in and pursuit of younger men (to young to be pursued), has proved an obstacle to Michael in the past as he attempted to become a priest, a long-held dream of his.

I’m wondering if, in this part of the sermon, James is reproducing Murdoch’s religious views. I imagine not, as she was a philosopher of great nuance and subtlety, bringing together diverse threads of thought including the British analytic tradition in which she was trained, existentialism as developed by Sartre, Simone Weil’s concept of attention, and Plato’s moral realism. James’ idea that we can know moral rules with certainty seems a little coarse for Murdoch.

I am wondering to what extent did Murdoch escape the fantasy and apparent simplicity of Christian religion for the reality and complexity of human life? Is James actually a mouthpiece for Murdoch here?

This novel was published in 1958 and was Murdoch’s fourth novel. I have not read the introduction in the entirety, as I wanted to approach the book without foreknowledge of how it might be interpreted. I want to construct my own interpretation and approach it as textuality. But I did see a comment in the introduction mentioning this was her first novel that included specifically religious subject matter.

A very different book I’m reading

At the same time as I’m reading The Bell, I’m reading Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts. I picked it up because one or another of the AI chatbots I use suggested it might serve as a model for a book I’d like to write, one which weaves together my personal experience of midlife transformation with philosophical ideas that make sense of what I’ve gone through, and what I’m going through.

Nelson’s book brings together personal narrative and critical theory as she shares the story of her pregnancy alongside the female-to-male transition her partner Harry undertakes.

I confess I find the book difficult and not very engaging. It doesn’t even have chapters to help me know when I might take a break! While I am reading The Bell very closely and slowly, I am more apt to bring my usual reading style to The Argonauts: quick skimming to get the gist. Much of the critical theory goes over my head. There is too much anal sex in it for my tastes, but I grant that particular act does provide a hook for Nelson to reflect on the right and desire of mothers to improvise beyond the maternal script. It seems the one part of the book that actually landed with me! Good to note that something may have a place in a memoir not because it is pleasant but because it is meaningful, and jarring too.

Nelson refers to the work of Roland Barthes again and again, but not in a way that made me remember what he was about, or made any sense to me. I blogged about his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” last August. This brings me back to the textuality of Nietzsche, and his philosophical perspectivism which says that there are many potentially incompatible perspectives we can take on the world, and they don’t relate to some underlying truth (Murdoch, with her neo-Platonism would disagree; she believes in the Real).

In his essay Barthes writes:

A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.

So my reading and understanding of The Bell is necessarily going to be an interpretation rooted in my history, biography, and psychology, as is my reading and understanding of The Argonauts.

I suppose Nelson’s book is an example of what I don’t want to write: something so deeply personal and so philosophically inaccessible that the ideas it shares remain locked up for a reader like me, who didn’t study critical theory in college. Like The Bell, The Argonauts weaves together personal philosophy with narrative story, but Murdoch’s story is easygoing and light (so far), while Nelson’s is (to me) strange and offputting. I recognize that much of my reaction is rooted in a culturally inculcated discomfort with some elements of Nelson’s transgressive approach to life. With de Beauvoir, I don’t seek freedom just for myself but also for other people. Interesting that the questioning and concerns I feel is a theme in The Bell too, but in a way that is of the time it was written (the 1950s).

Learning to read literature

This has been a very interesting post to write, and I’ve very much enjoyed reading The Bell closely to understand what Murdoch is doing with plot and character to advance her philosophical program.

As a college student, I was steeped in logic and philosophy, and also the systems-style thinking of my economics classes. The one literature class I took — Russian literature — proved to be my worst class, both in terms of enjoyment and the grade I walked away with. I didn’t know how to read a novel, what to look for, how to take my time with it. This is a new experience for me, to not just read quickly for the plot, but rather to take my time with the characters and what they’re saying and thinking, and what it means.

As I’ve been working on my writing practice, I’ve considered that I could use fiction writing techniques to make any memoir stories I might write more compelling and meaningful. I did that with my Things Men Gave Me essays (now on pause, but ready to be incorporated into a book on midlife transportation).

I feel like I’m starting too late — like I’ve missed out on decades of reading literature slowly and contemplatively. But perhaps this is just pointing me to a new joy, one which only arrived in my field of view when I was ready for it. It’s another aspect of my midlife transformation, I suppose.

Trading based on feelings and convictions doesn’t work, I’ve learned through expensive lessons. Trading based on trend following, attention to charts (which can tell you when a trend is reaching exhaustion or has reversed), diversification (because you can’t predict which sectors will do well), and broad market sentiment does.

I came across a stock market indicator approach that I hadn’t heard of before over the weekend: the Donchian channel (DC). This can help you identify new bullish or bearish trends, breaking out from previous channels (areas of consolidation, where an asset price is staying confined to a particular range).

A DC uses the highest high and the lowest low of the last n periods (e.g., last six months, last 50 days, etc.) These bullish and bearish extremes can indicate a breakout up or down, and suggest when you should buy, sell, go short, or exit a short.

Portfolio manager Paul Mulvaney, who claims 20% per year returns for more than 26 years of trading, reportedly uses Donchian channel breakouts to identify new long and short entries in his commodity trading approach. A reverse engineering of his rules suggests he uses six-month lookbacks.

Mulvaney doesn’t apparently use a simple DC-based indicator for exiting long or short trades, but uses probability estimates to place stop losses and reposition them daily “in accordance with a volatility analysis.”

Turtle trading using Donchian channels

As I was learning about Donchian channels, I discovered an interesting commodity trading experiment that was completed in 1983. Commodity traders Richard Dennis and William Eckhardt wanted to see if great traders are born or can be trained. A set of complete beginner traders were given a trading rulebook based on Donchian channel breakouts and tested to see if they could do as well as experienced traders. The beginner traders successfully made money, generating a reported 150 million dollars, based on an initial kitty of about $1 million for each of 23 traders.

The rules the traders in the experiment followed were:

1. Focus only on highly liquid futures markets with tight spreads and deep orders books, to ensure smooth execution, reduced slippage (losing money because of the difference between bid/ask spreads), and clean price movements.
2. Use position sizing to manage risk. Limit initial risk to 1% of capital using the formula position size = (1% of capital) / (2 x ATR) where ATR is the average true range, or the difference between the most recent high and low for a period (sometimes 14 days).
3. Enter positions when an asset’s price exceeds the high of the past 20 days (the 20-day Donchian channel). Go short an asset when the price falls below the low of the last 20 days.
4. Set an initial stop loss at 2N below the entry point for a long position or 2N above for a short position. This can help cut losses quickly if the market doesn’t move as expected.
5. Use trailing stops to protect gains. Adjust stops to a 10-day low for long positions or a 10-day high for short positions, locking in profits while still allowing room for the returns to grow.
6. Use pyramiding to increase the position in increments as the market moves favorably. Add another unit of the trade as the market moves every 0.5N in the right direction, up to four units total. There were other limitations on risk based on correlated markets and how much long or short the traders were (12 units maximum long or short).

Can it work now?

A backtest of some simplified turtle trading rules found that it didn’t do well over the past 20 years, over 4322 trades. It had a winning rate of 36.83%, an annual return of -0.38%, and a max drawdown of more than 95%!

Rayner Teo, who ran the backtest, also tried a modified version that increased the number of markets to trade, reduced risk per trade, and increased the length of the breakout. In this backtest, the winning rate was 41%, annual return 32%, and maximum drawdown -42%. In this case, the entry was a breakout above the 200-day high (instead of 20-day), a stop loss of 2 ATR from the entry price, a trailing stop loss of the 10 day low, and risk management reduced to 1% of the account from 2%. Of course, reverse the numbers for short trades.

Teo offers the following three lessons from his analysis:

1. Understand the logic and concept behind your trading strategy. Based on this you can develop multiple trading strategies and diversify your risk. Understand it well enough that you don’t abandon it when a drawdown comes.
2. Manage your risk. In a modified backtest of the modified turtle strategy he analyzed he increased max risk to 4%. In this case he saw an annual return of 76% but a maximum drawdown of 96%. You can’t recover from that! You blew up!
3. Adapt to changing market conditions. I don’t see this as an implication of his analysis but rather a meta-principle that a particular trading strategy won’t work all the time. I’ve been trying the options wheel with a lot of success lately but if we get into a grinding bear market, it won’t work well.

How can I use this?

I’m thinking about how to work this into my trading. I want to enter and exit trades based on indicators not on feelings. The DC has the benefit of being simple. But it needs to be used alongside key practices around diversification, position sizing/risk management, and which trades to do in which situation. That’s an analysis for another day.

I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.

My number one task this week: Develop entry criteria for my trades

Last week was a difficult one for me in my trading, as I had put on a couple positions that were counter-trend and not very well planned out. The continuing trend slapped me down.

I could have written this Reddit post myself:

Can’t stop trading against the trend

For me it feels like a reversal can happen at any moment so I’m afraid to trade with the trend and it’s blowing me up trying to go for reversals, I just can’t get it through my head that trend is your friend.

Anyone else had this problem or is struggling with this?

This has been a long-standing problem of mine. I’m too contrarian. Generally speaking, the market tends to keep moving in the same direction it’s been moving. Momentum is my friend!

The top suggestion in response to the Reddit post is to “stop trading your feeling. You will always have feeling- thinking the market may go up or down- but stop trading it.”

Instead, use specific entry criteria. I have not done that. So that’s my number one task for this week: develop specific entry criteria for trades, and be more clear about what kind of trades I want to be doing right now. My options wheel trades are doing great. My expansion into other kinds of options trades: credit spreads, debit spreads, and deeply in-the-money calls, not so great. That’s because I approached the options wheel with a much more systematic set of rules and I’ve been winging it on the others.

Alongside that, I’m planning to limit my Twitter scrolling which causes too many feelings, and too many counter-trend impulses.

Expanding my daily routine to include reading great novels

What will I do instead of scrolling Twitter and reading financial news? Slow reading of great novels.

Yesterday, I wrote about Alexander Nehamas’ theory that Nietzsche believed you should live your life as though it were great literature, as though it were a literary text to interpret.

I love this idea. It provides a way of approaching the events of my life in a way that imbues them with meaning, that makes the bad parts of it equally or more important than the good parts (because who wants to read a story where nothing bad happens to the protagonist?), and where not everything has to turn out okay (it could be a tragedy, right? I hope not, but there’s no good reason to assume my life, or various situations within it, will have a happy ending).

To me this textuality of life idea provides a counterpoint to Buddhist ideas of acceptance and mechanical cognitive behavioral therapy style thought disputation and thought reformulation. When you practice amor fati (love of fate) you don’t dispute that terrible, horrible things may have happened or may happen in the future. You don’t cultivate equanimity in the face of grief, terror, joy, ennui. You welcome all parts of life, and seek to act as a protagonist who would be worthy of being in a novel. You seek to be a monumental character, at least in your own story.

Thinking about turning my own life into literature, treating it as a text to interpret, not a set of happenings to reframe (CBT) or let go of (Buddhism), makes me more interested in reading great literature.

I started Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell yesterday which is not considered one of her best works, but it is an accessible one. After I finish it, I’m planning to read her 1978 Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea.

And I’ve requested Anna Karenina from the library. I’ve read it before, but not from the angle I’ll be approaching it now.

I do read a lot, both fiction and nonfiction, but I’ve not done it in a kind of slow, contemplative style like I plan to approach it now. I learned to read very fast when I was in elementary school and I brought that with me through now. It’s time to cultivate a different kind of reading style.

ChatGPT gave me a few ideas about what to pay attention to when reading The Bell:

1. Watch for “private stories” vs shared reality.
2. Notice how people fail to see each other clearly.
3. Pay attention to the moral weight of ordinary perception.
4. Observe the “community experiment” structure (The Bell about a lay community forming as an accessory to a nunnery).
5. Look for moments of cognitive and moral dislocation — where someone’s story about the world stops working.
6. Don’t rush to unify everything into a single interpretive synthesis.

That last one is very important. A great novel can’t be distilled down into one simplistic theme. That’s the very nature of textual interpretation: there should be many interpretations possible, and it’s up to the reader to construct her own.

In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes of how conflict with her partner makes her think of simplistic fiction:

We bantered good-naturedly, yet somehow allowed ourselves to get polarized into a needless binary. That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.

What might be similar to this in treating your life as a text to interpret is if you try to narrate events too neatly along the lines of the idea “everything happens for a reason” or “it’s either a blessing or a lesson” — meaning everything in your life is either a good thing (a blessing) or a lesson (something to learn from).

Ideally great novels will help me see my life in more colors with more ideas and less pat summaries. I could explore this right here with all the black-and-white stories of my life but I don’t want to make this into a tell-all.

Tarot archetype evolution

I like to have a Tarot card in mind to guide my week. This week: King of Wands.

I’ve long resonated with the Nine of Pentacles as an archetype to live by. The card pictures a woman alone in her garden, wearing fancy robes, and surrounded by pentacles (a.k.a. coins). She has a falcon on her arm representing intelligence and discipline.

But lately that archetype feels too focused on the fact of my singlehood and my money.

Yesterday I drew King of Wands in a reading, as guidance for figuring out how I show up in solitude or for belonging — that is, responding to the question of my singlehood and how I embody it, live it, or discard it.

The King of Wands has mastered creative fire. His robe shows salamanders with their tails in their mouths, meaning maturity and completion, according to Rachel Pollack in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom.

And the King is obviously not a symbol of single womanhood. He is more a representation of what I can be on my own — a king in my own right (and a queen too).

The shadow card of the reading was the Six of Wands, showing a man on horseback with a laurel wreath on his head, riding as though in a parade. It represents victory and triumph, external recognition.

This card represents my need to be seen as winning. Even as I try to live with Nietzsche’s amor fati, loving my fate into eternity, I’m wishing for a comeback, a return to the life where I felt recognized and validated.

This card asks me: what would it mean to affirm my life fully if no one ever witnessed it? If my artwork weren’t exhibited or sold? If I never wrote a book to great acclaim? If I never walked an aisle as a bride again? If my options trading never made so much money I could brag about it?

Combine this with the King of Wands, represented by fire, and I start to think about a burning away of who I was and what I wished for. This is something other than Dabrowski’s positive disintegration: quicker, more violent, probably more painful

In Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore writes of this king:

And so even if the fire is a destructive force in a person’s life, it has the potential within it to be a catalyst for maturing. One of the most often noted features of the King of Wands is his restless energy. As a king is a symbol of something exalted, fire in its highest function always has a job to do. To keep burning away and burning away to vapor what is not true.

This leads back to Nietzsche’s textuality, his amor fati. A story, a life, that includes a burning away of what is not true will be much more compelling than one in which nothing needs burning away — or one in which a person refuses to face the fire, to live through it, to reconstruct and rebuild after, when all is ashes.

I’m thinking of this need of mine to leave Han’s achievement society behind. What I need, instead of burning out is to burn up.

Today I’m thinking about Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence: can you so thoroughly affirm your life that you would wish it to repeat again and again, exactly the same way, into eternity?

With this (and his other key ideas), Nietzsche was rebelling against what he thought of as nihilistic religions and philosophies, which located meaning outside one’s life — in God, in progress, in some final purpose rather than in actual lived experience.

How to make sense of this theory, and Nietzsche’s other ideas?

life as literature

In his 2003 book Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Alexander Nehamas suggests that Nietzsche’s ideas all make sense in terms of textuality and literature — life as narrative, as being subject to many interpretations some of which are better than others, as being lived best if lived as art.

From the description of the Nehamas’ book:

More than eighty years after his death, Nietzsche’s writings and his career remain disquieting, disturbing, obscure. His most famous views―the will to power, the eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, the master morality―often seem incomprehensible or, worse, repugnant. Yet he remains a thinker of singular importance, a great opponent of Hegel and Kant, and the source of much that is powerful in figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Derrida, Heidegger, and many recent American philosophers.

Alexander Nehamas provides the best possible guide for the perplexed. He reveals the single thread running through Nietzsche’s views: his thinking of the world on the model of a literary text, of people as if they were literary characters, and of knowledge and science as if they were literary interpretation. Beyond this, he advances the clarity of the concept of textuality, making explicit some of the forces that hold texts together and so hold us together.

This idea of textuality says that Nietzsche is asking us to think of both our selves and our lives as texts — things whose meaning is not given in advance but emerges through interpretation.

Like a great novel, our lives contain many events, characters, and tensions. They may contain contradictions and ambiguities. In a great novel, there is no one thesis promoted, no one proposition that the novel sets out to prove. A novel expresses meaning, often very complex, through how its parts fit together. There is not a hidden essence waiting to be discovered. What a novel, and a life, expresses emerges from the interaction of all ite elements, and from the interpretation a reader produces based on those.

Nietzsche was a philologist; what is philology anyway?

Every time I come back to Nietzsche I have to remind myself what philology is. That wasn’t a major available to me when I was in college. Nietzsche was a classical philologist before becoming a philosopher. At age 24, he became a professor at the University of Basel, largely on the strength of his work in Greek philology.

In the 19th century, philology (the study of language in historical and literary sources) involved the interpretation of fragmentary texts, reconstructing meaning from incomplete evidence, and understanding how a work’s parts fit together.

Nehamas suggests that Nietzsche never really stopped being a philologist. He simply turned his tools of textual interpretation onto culture, morality, and, later, the self.

To Nietzsche, proposes Nehamas, a life resembles a text. It doesn’t have a fixed meaning independent of interpretation. It contains tensions and contradictions. It can only be understood retrospectively. And it acquires significance through the relation among all its parts.

This doesn’t imply that life is fictional. It means that the meaning of a life is not immediately expressed or obvious or sitting there waiting to be extracted.

While the events of your, and my, life are real, what they amount to requires interpretation, and attention to every element and their interactions.

Furthermore, by thinking of your life as a text, as a novel, as a work of art, you are better prepared to make it something meaningful, terrible, and wonderful.

a narrative of the self

The textual perspective of Nietzsche’s ideas asks: Can you make your life into something that can be read as a coherent, distinctive, and affirmable whole?

Can you make it like a great novel? Both through your interpretations of the past, and the actions you take to shape the life that is still being written?

Can you make yourself into a heroine, or hero, who lives like a great literary character? By showing a distinct style and personality, by developing complexity yet displaying a unity of character?

By not avoiding suffering or struggle, but by incorporating it into some meaningful narrative arc?

Can you make your life resemble a successful work of literary art?

Why I’m thinking about this today

I’m having a wonderful time learning options trading and at the same time I’m having a terrible time. While I’ve been successful so far in showing profits, what I’ve achieved is far less than what I could have achieved simply by following conventional investing wisdom: buy and hold a diversified set of low-cost index funds. In the last nine weeks or so the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ 100 have seen an incredible run up, largely on the basis of a semiconductor stock rally. While I captured some of these gains via short puts on Micron and Taiwan Semiconductor, for the most part I missed out. And I kept up with my energy positions even as they have lagged while everyone gave up on higher crude oil prices.

If I approach life not with the idea that I must optimize (or maximize) my outcomes — the most happiness, the most stability, the best house, the highest stock market returns — but instead as a complicated story with myself as the complicated heroine at the center, my struggles make much more sense. They become a crucial and necessary part of the story.

No one would want to read a story of someone whose life had no struggle, no grief, no suffering.

Would I want to live such a life?

Nietzsche would say that I should not want to live such a life. Imagining a life without suffering negates the reality of human life — every human life. It is nihilistic.

Instead, he exhorts me to affirm my life in its wonderfulness and terribleness.

Art needs contrast, and if my life is to be a work of art, then there must be grief and pain and struggle and missteps.

I was scrolling Twitter yesterday afternoon and I came across a sad video about a puppy with brain damage. I quickly moved past it, trying to keep my awareness out of the way of it, but I knew too much already; I had seen too much already. I felt this tremendous sadness and grief take over my mind and my body. I began crying. I tried to push what I had just read and saw away. The images and story kept coming back to me. I tried to escape the suffering. Ultimately, for a few minutes I could not. I could just feel the grief of the world.

I thought of trying to turn towards the suffering, as I learned to do with tonglen practice. I thought of all the animals, and people too, who suffer in this world. I know that pushing it away and trying to hide from it doesn’t mean there’s not pain and hurt and discomfort and disability.

I spent a few minutes being present with the suffering, crying for the puppy and the people who cared for it, and for anyone else who suffers in that way. I thought of the goddess Quan Yin who hears the cries of the world. For a few minutes I tried to embody the compassion of Quan Yin.

Ines Freedman, in her dharmette Being Somebody and Nobody (3 of 5) – The Skillful Self says that practicing mindfulness can help you stay present with suffering:

[Sometimes] it takes courage to be present for suffering. I mean, I know the experience of just being with an itch and feeling like I cannot stay with it. It’s insufferable. I cannot stay with it. But staying with it and seeing it to the other end of it and opening to it. Ajahn Chah
said, ”Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering.”

Because usually when suffering appears, the self mobilizes almost immediately. It wants to fix it, escape it, become something else, protect the identity. But the practice teaches us to turn towards the suffering, the uncomfortable, the unwanted, with curiosity, with courage, and with kindness.

She relates this to developing trust and confidence that you can be present for anything that happens in life:

And over time, confidence becomes less about self‑image and more about just being available, available to life, to joy, to sorrow, to uncertainty. There’s a kind of healthy self‑esteem that can be equally at ease being nobody, going nowhere, or winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
Because confidence no longer depends so much on who we think we are, but on trusting awareness itself, trusting in presence, trusting in the capacity to meet what arises.

mindfulness of the trader

I needed that ability to be present yesterday for another reason: a key new trade that I’d opened on Tuesday went in the wrong direction Wednesday. The plan is to hold this position for months so one day’s returns aren’t anything I should focus on. But I found myself feeling physically ill for most of the day just thinking about it.

I probably should have set a timer and meditated for ten minutes. Doing that always reminds me that I can, in the moment, be present for almost any amount of discomfort.

I used to meditate every day but it’s been years since I did that. Now that I’m focusing my workdays on trading, I probably would benefit from working that into my routine.

So much of my discomfort with trading is about my ego — about my achievements, my returns, what I deserve in life versus what I’m getting. Instead, I will seek the confidence that Freedman talks about, “trusing in presence, trusing in the capacity to meet what arises.”

Present for the joy too

Last night I had my younger sister and her son over to celebrate her birthday. My mom and my dad attended as well. We got takeout from Modern Market and my mom made a delicious chocolate cake with chocolate icing. “Sarah loves chocolate!” my mom said, and I realized I didn’t know that about her.

After dinner, I let the animals out of my room where they had been confined. Carlos the cat immediately targeted my nephew for cuddling and attention, and my nephew was more than happy to oblige.

“We need to get a cat, Mom!” he said.

We talked about various eye problems, my macular pucker, my nephew’s strabismus, my father’s many eye surgeries.

Before the event I wanted to cancel. I didn’t have the energy for it. I felt full of ennui for some reason.

I’m so glad I went forward with it. Sometimes, with family, I feel like a version of me that I don’t like, reflecting my history, reflecting memories in which I held my ego too strongly. Last night I felt less burdened by myself, as Freedman describes:

[As] the self becomes healthier, more wholesome, it becomes less rigid, less defended, more compassionate, more playful, more transparent. Our personality doesn’t disappear. It’s just held a lot more lightly. The point of practice is not to create a particular kind of self, but a self that is less burdened, less burdened by comparison, by fear, by the need to constantly prove, defend, or become, a self that can be honest and tender and strong without becoming rigid. The skillful self becomes the unburdened self, not because life becomes perfect, but because we stop carrying so much extra. [emphasis mine]

Being present for every season and its beauty or its grief

Freedman ends her talk with a short poem by a 13th Zen master:

Spring has its hundred flowers, autumn its moon. Summer has its cooling breezes, winter its snow. If your mind is not clouded by pointless things, this is the best season of your life.

Maybe today I’ll restart my meditation practice.

In the dotcom boom, the Nasdaq Composite index rose from roughly 1,000 in 1995 to a peak of about 5,048 in March of 2000 — the bubble’s peak. Then it crashed almost 80% through its nadir on October 9, 2002. It took about 15 years to fully recover.

Here’s a chart of the run-up and the crash.

This is relevant for today because we are almost certainly in a bubble. The question is how much further does it have to run? Are we in 1998, with another 250% to go? Or are we in February 2000, almost to the peak?

No one knows, though many people will analyze it and try to predict.

What to do if you are retired or almost there?

If you’re close to retirement — or already basically retired, like me — this matters because you don’t have fifteen years for your money to recover, should the broad market crash. You may need that money in the near future.

Now may be a time to begin slowly adding diversifiers that may do well even if the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite index struggle, if their main big holdings lose air. That is, if you don’t already hold them. I’m pretty well diversified in my biggest retirement account across all factors — geography, company size, value vs growth, commodities, fixed income, and alts.

In the early 2000s, value stocks held up better than growth and outperformed for several years. Small cap value, international stocks, commodities and natural resources investments, gold, and bonds did well.

But meanwhile, probably a good idea to stay bullish on the stocks that are doing well, so as not to miss out on what are likely to be more incredible gains!

I’ve found myself restless lately, browsing homes in the foothills near Denver, thinking I want to live more simply, more rurally, with more space, and less heavily-maintained lawn.

But, having made such changes before, I know that what I’m really craving is soul-level change not a change in domicile. I know that even in my suburban golf-course house cozied up next to the neighbors I can seek and possibly find what I’m seeking.

What am I seeking though?

Today’s book is Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr. Rohr follows Carl Jung in proposing that the first half of life demands you conform to society and in the second you break free. He quotes Jung:

We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

And explains:

[The] task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one’s life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container is meant to hold and deliver. As Mary Oliver (1935–2019) put it, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In other words, the container is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of our deeper and fullest life, which we largely do not know about ourselves. Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never “throw their nets into the deep” (Luke 5:4) to bring in the huge catch that awaits them.

My house, my investment portfolio, my relationships—these are the container I’ve built. To borrow Rohr’s idea: I don’t need to change the container (yet again). It’s time to focus single-mindedly on the tasks of the second half of life.

What shall I put in this commodious container I’ve constructed?

Stumbling into the spiritual journey of midlife

I have, in fact, been working on tasks of the second half of life for more than fifteen years, when I first fell into it. Rohr writes in chapter 5, “Stumbling over the stumbling stone,” that this experience of getting tripped up by life is inevitable (at least if you are to take on the spiritual journey at midlife):

Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point, you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it. To state it in our language here, you will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey. I wish I could say this was not true, but it is darn near absolute in the spiritual literature of the world.”

I stumbled into it when I met a man not my husband, fell in love, and thought I could swap out one husband for another, leaving the rest of the container of my life largely the same.

It turned out I could not. It turned out that the affair I pursued and its aftermath led me into the tasks of the second half of life. In the first half of life, I did what I was supposed to do — finished college and earned a master’s degree, got married and had children, built financial wealth — and then discovered that the life I built, the container I constructed, lacked the meaning and transcendence I felt driven to find.

I suppose that’s because a container is not itself meaning. It provides a way to hold and express meaning.

I tried to maintain my ego during my transformational midlife journey, but I failed to be able to.

Rohr writes:

Any attempt to engineer or plan our own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. We will see only what we have already decided to look for, and we cannot see what we are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force us to look where we never would otherwise.

I tried to put my life back together by finding new elements to replace the elements I no longer had: new corporate jobs, new boyfriends, a new house. This is Dabrowski’s unilevel disintegration: trying to fix a life by swapping out components rather than by questioning, and perhaps even tearing down, the entire structure.

Ultimately this only brought suffering, Rohr’s “failure and humiliation” that forced me eventually to look elsewhere.

Rohr writes that suffering through this process is inevitable:

So, we must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. And that does not mean reading about falling, as you are doing here. We must actually be out of the driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. This kind of falling is what I mean by necessary suffering.

After stumbling and falling down

Rohr proposes that a kind of vita contemplativa could be the solution for the second half of life:

Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text. We all tend to move toward a happy and needed introversion as we get older. Such introversion is necessary to unpack all that life has given us and taken from us. We engage in what is now a necessary and somewhat natural contemplation.

This seems true for me, but I imagine it is only true for a certain sort of person.

He also suggests that you might seek solitude at this time: “One of the great surprises at this point is that you find that the cure for your loneliness is actually solitude!”

Indeed this is where I have landed, after the great tumble I took: a commitment to living alone, and a turning towards the contemplative and commentating life. An ongoing attempt to put down ego and the demands of our consumerist achievement society to instead focus on what is meaningful, what is transcendent, what is subtle and quiet.

Commodities expert Jeff Currie says don’t trust the market’s assessment on oil prices right now:

Right now, I have exposure to oil and its derivatives in a couple ways: via short puts on $XLE, an ETF covering the energy sector of the S&P 500; via a short put on $XOP which represents a broader selection of oil & gas companies; via a long position in $PDBA (an ETF holding agricultural commodity futures); and a short put on $SHEL.

I’d like to try some other possibilities. I could invest directly in $BNO and $USO, ETFs betting on the spot price of crude oil (Brent and WTI, respectively) but these issue K-1s at tax time, which are a hassle. I could buy puts or calls or do various other options trading on them, which I don’t think would result in a K-1, as long as I always closed out the contracts before getting assigned. You can’t always control assignment, but of course if you just buy calls and puts you always have control over what happens.

The thing I’m most interested in right now is to learn to do futures trading.

Currie describes how trading futures — for example, oil futures — is different from trading stocks (or options on stocks):

Because of my brief foray into the silver market — not trading silver futures but following what was happening with them — I’m well aware of how you can blow up as a futures trader.

Still, as we likely enter a new commodities supercycle I think now is the ideal time to learn. I’m a conservative trader so I trust I will be careful with my money, as I always have been!

Supplies for this week: Mexican sunflower and cosmos seeds to grow as a screen for the one area of my backyard not shielded from the neighbors’ eyes (plus bags of garden soil and potting mix to plant them in), stone tile sealer and sanded grout in light smoke to fix an area of deterioration in my main bath, silicone spray to stop the upstairs window from squeaking when I open it each morning to run the attic fan and cool the house.

When I was married, I let my husband to do any fix-it tasks around the house. After the divorce, I began a slow process of learning to do those tasks myself. I replaced a flapper valve in a toilet. I bought a drill and a set of drill bits and figured out how to use them. I followed YouTube videos to replace headlight bulbs in my car. I stained my fence; I replaced rotted molding in my bathroom; I discovered I needed to replace the filter in my humidifier regularly lest hard water buildup prevent its operation.

I now own a lawn mower, a weed wacker, and a leaf blower and know how to use them reasonably competently. When I need to till soil, I do it myself with my own spade. I bought a handy device to aerate my lawn. When I recently wanted to clear a flower bed of overgrown raspberry brambles planted by my house’s previous owner, I grabbed that spade and went to work.

While my ex-husband was reasonably competent mechanically (and was trained as a mechanical engineer even), I gravitated towards even handier men after divorce, because their skills and manliness were attractive to me but perhaps more because I wanted those skills for myself. I dated a carpenter (who imagined himself an Indian-style Jesus), a guy who fixed his own Jeep, and, most recently, a self-described “mechanical genius” (he was indeed). These relationships — no, these men — offered me the opportunity to develop more manual competence under their tutelage, and I relished the chance to do that, even as I also enjoyed having someone around who could handle tasks I wasn’t comfortable with. Or wasn’t strong enough to handle.

In his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Matthew Crawford argues for the significance of these kinds of efforts, against our culture’s aggrandizement of knowledge work:

In this book I would like to speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.

Today, I want to speak up for manual competence, and how glad I am to have developed it at midlife. Later than I should have, but at least I did it. Crawford suggests that in exercising manual competence, I am aiming for individual agency, seeking meaningful work and self-reliance at the same time.

He writes:

With hard economic times looming, we want to become frugal. Frugality requires some measure of self-reliance—the ability to take care of your own stuff. But the new interest in self-reliance seems to have arisen before the specter of hard times. Frugality may be only a thin economic rationalization for a movement that really answers to a deeper need: We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.

Crawford’s work is newly relevant today as knowledge workers find themselves staring into an abyss of unemployment possibility brought about by the rise of generative AI. Now, college seems less like a sure path towards economic success and more a way of getting yourself into debt thinking you can do someithing better than a machine can. Now fifty-something technologists like myself facing layoffs find it’s almost impossible to get a new job, even as openings for those without any experience in the workforce disappear.

Manual competence and craftsmanship are fashionable again.

This week

Plans include

• Continuing to plant seeds and seedlings in the back garden, for both screening and beauty
• Fix the squeaky windows by cleaning the tracks and lubricating them with silicone WD-40
• Complete the tile fix-it job in my bathroom
• Family dinner at my house Wednesday — my sister and her son are in town
• Continue decluttering the house to make room for my daughter — she moved in over the weekend
• The usual – walking the dogs, trading options and stock positions, painting (have a couple new ones in process).

When I can’t think of anything to write, I turn to the Tarot. I pulled three cards this morning for a quick reading, hoping for something that would provide the basis for today’s post.

Here’s what I drew:

• Current Situation: Justice
• Course of Action: King of Swords
• Outcome: Two of Pentacles

This reading progresses from very serious (Justice) to a more playful destination (Two of Pentacles) via a reminder to cultivate attention (King of Swords).

I’ll start with the ending, rather than the beginning. The Two of Pentacles shows a man in motion, maybe even dancing, holding two pentacles (coins) within an infinity loop. In the background, ships sail on waves larger than they are. They are managing well and don’t look like they’re about to capsize.

This card generally represents balancing and juggling the activities of life.

In her book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Tarot interpreter Rachel Pollack writes of the Two of Pentacles:

Like the Two of Swords the Two of Pentacles strikes a precarious balance, though in general a happier one. We see, in fact, the very concept of balance in the image of the juggler. At times the card means juggling life itself, keeping everything in the air at once. More simply, it carries the idea of enjoying life, having a good time – similar to the Nine of Cups, but lighter, a dance more than a feast.

Like so many Pentacles, the card implies a hidden magic in its ordinary pleasures. The juggler holds his magic emblem within a loop or ribbon shaped like an infinity sign, the same sign which appears above the head of the Magician, and the woman in Strength. Some people believe that spiritual development occurs only in serious moments. Pleasure and amusement can also teach us a great deal, as long as we pay attention. [emphasis mine]

I’ve written before about the magic of everyday life. In January of 2025, I declared that I might never go back to the traditional workforce, and quoted writer Amie McNee, “I must have magic. I demand a life that I love.” Now, almost eighteen months later, I have achieved what I declared I wanted (actually demanded) in that post: a life that I love, a life that is filled with everyday, ordinary magic.

There is magic in the everyday, if you pay attention.

Cultivating attention as the power of life and death

Since adding foster dog Sally to my household menagerie, I’ve had to work to cultivate better presence and attention. I discovered I cannot walk Sally with my dog Bo. Sally requires too much caution and strength to control. I discovered this through what could have been a disaster, when Sally got away from me to go after another dog on leash. In the process, she hurt my hand, but fortunately didn’t cause any additional injury to anyone.

Now in the morning I walk Bo first, about a mile, which is long enough for him to do his business, and then I take Sally on a slow “sniffari” where she stops to inhale the scents of the neighborhood for lengthy periods of time. It takes us about fifteen minutes to cover the short distance around the block. She shows great attention to the present moment on these walks, but I find myself getting antsy and impatient. I want to finish the walk and get back to my computer, to do whatever I’m doing that day: trading options or writing a newsletter article for example, or working on the garden to make my house beautiful for the graduation party I’m having in a couple weeks.

Jessica Dore, in Tarot for Change, writes of guidance from the King of Swords to direct your attention:

In his Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Arthur Waite writes that the King of Swords is “the power of life and death.” If we consider that each card tells a psychological and spiritual secret in the domain to which it belongs—the swords about the intellectual experience, the cups about the emotional experience, the major arcana about the greater life journey, and so on—the King of the Swords’ instruction is that a person should work to develop concentration and the ability to direct and fix attention at will. If this king carries “the power of life and death,” his message is that developing a level of mastery with our attention endows us with the power to give life to any situation, and also the power to take it away.

This is a very beautiful way of thinking about attention: it is the power of life and death.

When I agreed to foster Sally I brought a new life to her, and a new life to me and the rest of my household. When I allow her to sniff the dew-wet grass in the morning for as long as she wants, I acknowledge her life and its importance.

When I’m distracted and in my head and not paying attention to what I’m doing, it’s like I think that reality is somewhere else. It’s a form of nihilism, of denying the actual reality of my life. When, conversely, I bring my awareness to whatever makes up my life in this moment I am affirming this moment, this life as it is.

The reality of justice

And now back to the first card of the reading: Justice. On first seeing this card, I thought I knew exactly what it meant: the lack of justice in the world, and not just the lack, but the overturning of justice happening far away from me, undertaken by people with power.

Or is it about me, not about other people, is it about owning up to decisions I’ve made in my life and things that have happened? Is it about affirming this life that is rather than the life I wish for, the life that I imagine could have been?

The current actions of the U.S. president and those who support him have made me reflect on the need for truth, decency, kindness, responsibility, and character — all qualities I find missing in the Trump administration.

Have I always acted with those qualities? No.

Pollack writes of the card’s message that you must take responsibility for who you have become through your actions and through what has happened to you, which paradoxically helps you release your past:

On the microcosmic level of personal psychology the Wheel of Fortune represented a vision of a person’s life; the events, who you are, what you’ve made of yourself. Justice indicates an understanding of that vision. The way to understanding lies in responsibility. As long as we believe that our past lives just happen, that we do not bring our own selves into existence through every thing we do, then the past remains a mystery, and the future an endlessly turning wheel, empty of meaning. But when we accept that every event in our lives has helped to form our characters, and that in the future we will continue to create ourselves through our actions, then the sword of wisdom cuts through the mystery.

Further, by accepting responsibility for ourselves we paradoxically free ourselves from the past. Like Buddha remembering all his lives, we can only get loose from the past by becoming conscious of it. Otherwise we constantly repeat past behaviour. This is why Justice belongs in the centre of our lives. The ego may be only a persona, a kind of mask, but that mask can control us as long as we will not admit having forged it ourselves.

When I walk Sally on her morning sniffari with gentle attention, allowing her to take her time, postponing my selfish need to dip myself into the dopamine waters of the Internet, I am acting with the very qualities I judge that other people should act with.

There is magic in attention, and I think maybe there is also magic in those qualities I would like to continuously embody: truth, decency, kindness, responsibility, and character. I have not always been attentive. I have not always been truthful, decent, kind, responsible. I have not always shown good character.

I wonder if my purpose in life now is to embody those things, starting with a foundation of attention to the reality of my life. I wonder if that’s where I will find magic at midlife.